This is an overview of the process of adding products to your facility in Party Center Software.
Note: The term “Products” in Party Center Software is an umbrella term that can be used when referring to Items, Parties, Coupons, Item Packages, Prepaid, and Party Packages.
Table of Contents
Product Types
- From the Admin menu, go to Product Management and select Products.
- In the upper right area of the page, click Add product.
- Choose your new product type.
Item
These are your standard items such as merchandise, food, beverages, open play. You also have the option to specify a vendor for these products. These can be sold through the POS or as add-ons to parties.
Party
These are all products that are scheduled or booked and can be assigned to a time slot (ig: parties, reservations, etc.). These are going to be the products that customers go through the online booking site to reserve. These can only be purchased from the online booking site or in-house by going to the schedule page.
Coupon
Coupons add a negative cost (reducing the overall price) to orders. These are a legacy feature and it is recommended that you use discounts to achieve this function.
Item Package
This is a set of items. You will need to have items in your product list prior to creating the package. This can be used to create bundles and combos for use in your POS.
Advanced Products
Click here to learn more about Pre-Paid Items and Party Packages.
Items
Name: This is what your item will be named i.e. Hot Dog, Adult T-Shirt.
Category: Categories help you organize your product list and your reports.
Price: This is the price that the item will be offered at. Keep in mind that this is not the price of the button in the POS. You can find out how to edit that button here.
Note: These are the only fields that are required when creating a new item product, allowing you to quickly make items on the fly as needed. Below are optional fields that can be filled out.
Active: This denotes whether the item is active, meaning it can be added to new orders and is visible on the product list. "Toggling Deactivate Mode" and selecting an item will automatically switch this setting to "No".
Description: Here is the text that will appear online when customers are selecting add-on's for their party and what will appear on customer invoices. You can also customize if you want this text to only appear online when selecting add-ons, on the order summary online, on the invoice or all of the above.
Vendor: This allows you to run the Vendor Report and easily send that outside business your needs for the day. Vendors are meant to be used if you are coordinating with an outside business to provide one or more of your products (i.e. guests can order Papa John's Pizza's).
Vendor Delivery Time Adjustment: When you want to adjust what the delivery time is on the vendor report based on the start time of the associated party, you can use this to have the delivery time adjusted so that the item arrives sometime before or after the parties start time.
Barcode: Here, you can input any associated bar code or Unique Product Code for this item. If you are using barcodes with your items, you can scan them when in the POS screen to automatically add them to the order.
Allow Discount: This dictates whether discounts can be applied to this product.
Hide on Invoice: You can use this option to have the product not appear as a line item on order invoices.
Applicable Taxes: Here is where you can select the taxes that are applied to this product. You can assign multiple tax rates to a party as well as check if the taxes are built into the price of the party.
After you have created an Item Product, additional options and tabs will appear for your item.
Online Store Link: This is a link if you have our Online Store Module to link customers directly to the purchase of this item in your Online Store. Click here to view our Online Store article.
Online Booking Tab
Available For Online Booking: This is an easy way to enable or disable items specifically for Online Booking, allowing items to still be sold through the Point-Of-Sale.
Deposit Amount: The amount in this field adds to the deposit already set for whatever party the customer is booking online.
Advance Notice Required: The amount of time put here can override the parties' "Advance Notice Required" setting if the add-on's Advanced Notice Required is greater than the parties.
Maximum Order Time: The amount of time put here can override the parties' "Maximum Order Time" setting if the add-on's Maximum Order Time is less than the parties.
Available Online With These Parties: Here, you can select the parties that have this product available as an add-on. If a party is grayed out, that means that the party is not available for online booking.
Images Tab
You can upload images that will appear on the Online Booking site here for your Items on the Add-Ons step of Online Booking.
Item Package
Item packages are very similar to normal items except that they consist of multiple items instead of being an item in and of themselves.
All of these properties function the same as any other item, but there are fewer settings as the Item Package will import the settings of the items that make it up.
Packaged Products Tab
The way that Packaged Products work is you pick already created items from your product list and use a combination of those to create your item package. This is good for when you want a single line item to show for the customer but reports will track the sale of both the package and the individual items in the package.
Hide on Receipt and Hide on Order: These checkboxes will show if the item package will show the individual items within the receipt and Order page. This is good if you don't want the customer to see the individual items, for example, a $0 cost item that is just for tracking.
Qty by Guest Count: This setting applies to when an item package is selected as an add-on for a party order. When checked, this will automatically add 1 of the checked item per guest in the order.
Note: Using the Qty by Guest Count function may cause unexpected pricing for any parties that have an item package.
Parties
Name: This is what your party will be named i.e. Birthday Bonanza, Silver Package.
Category: Categories help you organize your products list and your reports.
Note: These are the only fields that are required when creating a new party product, allowing you to quickly make items on the fly as needed. Below are optional fields that can be filled out.
Schedule Page Name: This is the name that will appear on the Schedule page.
Schedule Button Color: Using this button, you can select what color the reserve button will be for slots for this party, allowing you to easily color-code your schedule page.
Active: This denotes whether the item is active, meaning it can be added to new orders and is visible on the product list. "Toggling Deactivate Mode" and selecting a party will automatically switch this setting to "No".
Description: Here is the text that will appear online when customers are selecting their party and what will appear on customer invoices. You can also customize if you want this text to only appear booking online, on the online order summary, on the invoice, or all of the above.
Allow Discount: This dictates whether discounts can be applied to this product.
Hide on Invoice: You can use this option to have the party not appear as a line item on order invoices.
Applicable Taxes: Here is where you can select the taxes that are applied to this product. You can assign multiple tax rates to a party as well as check if the taxes are built into the price of the party.
Advanced Options
Auto Calculate Tip Percentage: This will automatically add a tip to all orders of this party based on a percentage of the total order price.
Party Time Adjustment: You can use this option to change the slot that this party is assigned to, either making it start earlier/later or having the slot end earlier/later.
Once a Party Product is created, you will see these new options become available.
Pricing & Guest Count
Guest Minimum: This will be the minimum amount of guest that can be booked for this party, meaning that if a customer tries to book less than this amount, they will get a message saying "Guest Count must not be less than X." and it will not allow them to book.
Guest Maximum: Your Guest Maximum is typically recommended to be the most people you would allow to have in the space, regardless of pricing. This is due to our system not calculating guest fees after this amount, only displaying a warning on the order itself.
Guest Label and Guest Description: These fields allow you to customize what you call your guests (tykes, jumpers, campers, etc).
Add Overflow Tier: Overflow tiers are how you can apply a charge per guest after a set amount (the threshold). You can have one or two tiers to price guests at.
Tier X Threshold: The number put as the threshold is the last guest that is not charged the fee. This means if the threshold is set to 10, every guest after the 10th (11,12,13, etc) is charged the fee per Overflow Guest.
Fee Per Overflow Guest: This is the fee that is charged for each guest after the threshold.
*Note: The guest is only charged the fee of the highest tier that applies ( the 17th guest in the above image would be charged only the Tier Two Fee)*
Allow Guests Booking Online to Exceed Threshold: This setting is used to prevent guests online from having more guests than the threshold while still charging for guests above the threshold if changing/booked in-house.
Second Guest Count: You can see below how it looks when a second guest count is used for a Party. It functions exactly the same as the first guest count.
Combined Guest Minimum: By default, this will be the sum of the minimum for both guest counts. This allows you to change this number to allow for a lower or higher minimum than the default.
Combined Guest Maximum: Using this can limit guests from exceeding a combined number of guests in your party space while allowing them to customize the type of guests themselves.
Price: This is the base price of the party, which includes all guests under the minimum and other products included with the party. The guest will always pay this amount for the party, with tax, guest fee's and add-on's added to this number.
Require Deposit: Deposits can be set to take the full party price upfront, a set deposit upon booking or no deposit from here.
Inlcude Guest Fees In Price: Changing this setting has initial customer invoices not show additional guest fees on invoices until a user in the PCS Portal has confirmed the guest count for the party. It does so by separating out the guest counts by estimated guests (whose guest fee's are not shown on the invoice) and confirmed guests (whose guest fee's are shown on the invoice).
Online Booking Tab
Available For Online Booking: Until this is set you "Yes", this party will not be bookable by customers through the online booking site, though users in the PCS Portal can still make in-house reservations for this party. This is useful for parties that you only want to be booked in-house.
Advance Notice Required: The advance notice time is the minimum pre-order time for this party, if the customer tries to order a party that is not at least this many hours in advance, the system will give them a message that is set in Online Booking Settings.
Maximum Order Time Allowed: If a party is booked more than this many hours in the future, a message will display letting them know that they must book it sooner. If you leave this setting to 0, there will be no maximum limit.
Items Available Online With This Party: The Items selected here will be available as add-ons for this party. You can click on "Sort Product List" to change the order in which your add-on's are displayed.
After selecting the party to be available for Online Booking, you will see additional options.
Online Booking Link: This link is used to lead customers to your online booking site with this party already selected, useful when you want to have a link under the party description on your website.
Specific Date/Time Link: If you create an event that has a large number of bookings available, you can use this link to send customers to the online booking site with this party already selected and a specific date and time selected.
Online Booking Description: The description listed here will overwrite the description in the Info Tab for the online booking listing.
Images Tab
You can upload images that will appear on the Online Booking site here for your parties.
Note: All Parties will have an image displayed on the Online Booking page, so if a customer image is not uploaded a blank image is used as the image. We recommend uploading an image for all parties because of this.
Advanced Products
Pre-Paid Items: These function exactly like normal Items but are designed to work as pre-paid items in another system such as Worldpay Gift Cards and Embed Cards. An account with an outside pre-paid system must be made for us to use the integration to use Pre-Paid Items.
Party Packages: Party Packages are used to sell items and parties that have different tax rates. It is recommended that you use Parties whenever possible as that is the designed workflow.
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